Slideshow: China fabless Nufront in search of new frontier

BEIJING — Nufront Co., a fabless chip company based here, is already a household name in the Android community in China. While still virtually unknown in the U.S., Nufront is a company to watch, as it battles against similar apps processor companies like RockChip and AllWinner in China. A larger question remains, though, how Nufront will define its new frontier – beyond the tablet/smartphone market.

Undoubtedly, the broad availability of popular, licensable IP cores like ARM (for apps processors) and CEVA (for baseband comms chips) has helped level the playing field for many Chinese fabless companies in recent years. Nufront is one of the beneficiaries.

Where Nufront differs from other up and comers, though, is that the company, founded in 2004, has already been around the block. Its eight years in the industry have cemented closer ties with the Chinese government agencies. With that comes government funding. Not everything has worked out in its favor, though, and the company has a few scars to show for it.

Acho tablet powered by Nufront’s apps processor

A case in point is China’s mobile TV standard. Nufront, in the mid-2000’s, dabbled with the nascent digital mobile TV market, throwing itself behind one of China’s home-grown mobile TV standards, Terrestrial-Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (T-MMB). However, just before the Beijing Olympics, China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) ended up supporting — and institutionalizing — a rival standard, China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (CMMB).

Nufront is also known for its deep involvement in developing China’s national wireless technology, called Enhanced Ultra-High Throughput (EUHT) WLAN. With government funding, Nufront has been working on the national standard for more than several years. While the world is yet to see EUHT commercialized, Rock Yang, vice president of marketing at Nufront, stressed that the project is still on, and its ultra-high throughput wireless technology – 1.2Gbit per second throughput – will be deployed in China’s vertical market in 2013.

Nufront today has about 700 employees, with a team of 400 engineers. Two hundred are software engineers, while 150 are working on hardware systems, and 50 are specifically focused on chipsets, according to the company.

ViMicro was founded more than 10 years by a couple Berkeley and Stanford returnees, and they IPOed on Nasdaq in 2004 (I forgot exactly which year, but long time ago). RockChip is also a company founded long time ago by mainly government funding. They didn't come up from nowhere.

The baseband and IPR strategy is interesting, as non of the Chinese chip makers have those, and the big guys like NV, Intel are all going after baseband. I think Nufornt is worth keeping an eye on, as 3,4 years ago, nobody heard of RockChip, AllWinner, ViMicro in the area as well. Chinese tablet will have a big share in the tablet market.

It will be difficult for NuFront. As the gateway of Chinese made tablets and provider of custom built tablet for vertical market, we at uPlay Tablet (http://www.uPlayTablet.com/) haven't seen them on our radar detector - we are working with handful of tablet factories and representing a couple top Chinese tablet brands, like Ainol . All of these tablets are powered by RockChip, AllWinner, ViMicro, and recently dual-core CPUs from AMLogic, but none of them by NuFront. The HDMI stick idea is not new, we have a few factories making such a product.

Nufront is certainly growing bigger than ever before. The issue is whether the company are generating enough revenue to sustain all the engineers they hired in recent years.
But I find the Nufront play in areas that go beyond apps processors interesting. Again, how it pans out will greatly affect the company's future.

Unlike Allwinner and Rockchip, who walks the talk, Nufront has been a marketing company and lives on burning Gov funding, fast, for years. In fact without Gov funding, it's dead years ago. I don't think this is a promising company by any standard.